Zoom Security Best Practices
Zoom has helped thousands of businesses and organizations connect more productively, reliably, and securely with video meetings. Zoom’s top priority, since the very beginning, has been to provide a safe and secure environment for all Zoom users. The Zoom platform comes loaded with host controls and numerous security features designed to effectively manage meetings, prevent disruption, and help users communicate remotely
Pre-Meeting Settings
With meeting settings in the Zoom web portal and the Zoom application, securing your Zoom Meetings can start before your event even begins.
Zoom can provide you peace of mind by providing greater assurance as to who will be attending your meeting. When scheduling a meeting, you can require attendees to register with their e-mail, name, and custom questions. You can even customize your registration page with a banner and logo. By default, Zoom also restricts participants to those who are logged into Zoom, and you can even restrict it to Zoom users whose email address uses a certain domain. Learn more about enabling Zoom meeting pre-registration here.
- One of the best ways to secure your meeting is to turn on Zoom’s Waiting Room feature. Some Zoom users, like those in education, will have this feature turned on by default. This feature provides a virtual waiting room for your attendees and allows you to admit individual meeting participants into your meeting at your discretion. Users can enable Waiting Room as a default account setting, for individual meetings, or as a meeting template. Learn more about Waiting Rooms.
- Customize the experience: once enabled, you can tailor your Waiting Room title, logo, and description, customizing what participants see when they arrive.
- Add additional helpful info: the description of your Waiting Room is a great place to add additional information, meeting guidelines, or rules for participants to follow.
- View and admit participants: as meeting attendees arrive, Zoom will notify you and provide you a list of those in the meeting, and those still in the waiting room, so you have total control of who joins your meeting.
- Message the waiting room: if you’re meeting with a smaller group of attendees, one attendee at a time, or your previous meeting is running long, you can message everyone in the waiting room and let them know.
- Remove participants: once you’ve admitted an attendee into your meeting, you can easily push them back to the Waiting Room or remove them from the meeting altogether, and can even prevent their return.
Your Personal Meeting ID (PMI) is the default meeting that launches when you start an ad hoc meeting. Your PMI doesn’t change unless you change it yourself, which makes it very useful if people need a way to reach you. But for public meetings, you should always schedule new meetings with randomly generated meeting IDs. That way, only invited attendees will know how to join your meeting. You can also turn off your PMI when starting an instant meeting in your profile settings.
You can take meeting security even further by requiring a passcode to join your meetings. This feature can be applied to both your Personal Meeting ID, so only those with the passcode will be able to reach you, and to newly scheduled meetings. To learn all the ways to add a passcode for your meetings, please view this support article.
In-Meeting Settings
Once your Zoom Meeting is off and running you’ll have access to a number of helpful features that put you in total control.
Zoom now puts all your essential security options in a single button, right in the in-meeting menu. Under this menu, you’ll be able to lock your meeting and prevent any new participants from joining. You’ll also be able to enable Waiting Room to help manage new meeting participants and be able to control any sharing and chat permissions of individuals and all attendees.
- Lock the meeting: Once all your attendees have arrived, you can easily lock your meeting from the security menu, preventing any additional attendees from joining.
- Enable waiting room
- Manage participants
Allowing participants to screen share in a meeting can be a great way to collaborate, but that can also leave you open to unwanted interruptions during larger meetings. Zoom gives you the ability to determine if you want other participants in the meeting to be able to share their screens, or if you want to be the only one with that ability. You can easily toggle this feature on and off from the screen sharing menu, as well as the security menu.
In-meeting chat adds another dimension of collaboration to your meetings, creating a place for questions to be asked and fielded later, or for supplemental resources to be posted. But sometimes chat can become distracting or unproductive. In those cases, Zoom allows you to disable and enc1able chat throughout your meeting.
Like screen sharing and in-meeting chat, annotation can be a great tool when you need it, but it can also be an opportunity for mischief when you don’t. To avoid unwanted annotation, Zoom allows you as the meeting host to remove all participants' ability to annotate during a screen share. You can disable this for the entire meeting, or just temporarily.
We’ve all been in meetings where somebody forgets to mute, or their microphone picks up some background noise that interrupts the meeting. Zoom allows you to solve this problem with a simple button to mute all participants. For an added layer of security, you can also disable participants’ ability to unmute themselves. When you’re ready to make the meeting interactive
again, you can simply hit the “Unmute All” button or allow participants to unmute themselves.
All the features we’ve covered so far are only accessible to meeting hosts, ensuring that hosts are the only ones with total control over a meeting. But what if you need a helping hand to manage all your participants? You can promote a trusted meeting attendee to Co-Host, allowing them many of the same privileges and control features available to the meeting host themselves. To learn about the difference between a host and co-host, view this support article.
If you follow all the best practices in this guide, you should never find yourself in a meeting with an unwanted guest. But if you do need to remove an attendee from the meeting at any point, Zoom makes it easy to kick an unwanted participant out of the meeting. For additional security, you can also choose to not allow participants to rejoin once they’ve been removed.
OIIT Recommendations
Office of Innovation and Information Technology is reaching out to you to provide some suggestions for securing your zoom meetings to help ensure the best experience for you and your participants.
- Refrain from posting any zoom meeting links on social media or websites
- Enable these security settings:
- Meeting password/passcode
- Waiting room
- Meeting registration
- Authenticated users can join meetings
- Remove or report the public post
- Delete this meeting and create a new one
- Send the new meeting information only to people you know
Security questions or issues?
If you have any questions or think you may have found a security vulnerability within Zoom, please submit a vulnerability report or contact our security team directly at infosec@nova.edu.